Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy

Appendix 7: A Brief History of Presidential Protection

In the course
of the history of the United States four Presidents
have been assassinated, within less than 100 years, beginning with
Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Attempts were also made on the lives of two
other Presidents, one President-elect, and one ex-President. Still
other Presidents were the objects of plots that were never carried
out. The actual attempts occurred as follows:

Andrew Jackson, Jan. 30, 1835.

Abraham Lincoln, Apr. 14, 1865. Died Apr. 15, 1865.

James A. Garfield, July 2, 1881. Died Sept. 19, 1881.

William McKinley, Sept. 6, 1901. Died Sept. 14, 1901.

Theodore Roosevelt, Oct. 14, 1912. Wounded; recovered.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Feb. 15, 1933.

Harry S. Truman, Nov. 1, 1950.

John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963. Died that day.

Attempts have thus been made on the lives of one of every five
American Presidents. One of every nine Presidents has been killed.
Since 1865, there have been attempts on the lives of one of every four
Presidents and the successful assassination of one of every five.
During the last three decades, three attacks were made.

It was only after William McKinley was shot that systematic and
continuous protection of the President was instituted. Protection
before McKinley was intermittent and spasmodic. The problem had
existed from the days of the early Presidents, but no action was taken
until three tragic events had occurred. In considering the
effectiveness of present day protection arrangements, it is worthwhile
to examine the development of Presidential protection over the years,
to understand both the high degree of continuing danger and the
anomalous reluctance to take the necessary precautions.

In the early days of the Republic, there was remarkably little
concern about the safety of Presidents and few measures were taken to
protect them. They were at times the objects of abuse and the
recipients of threatening letters as more recent Presidents have been,
but they did not take the threats seriously and moved about freely
without protective escorts. On his inauguration day, Thomas Jefferson
walked from his boarding house to the Capitol, unaccompanied by any
guard, to take the oath of office. There was no police authority in
Washing-

Page 505

ton itself until 1805 when the mayor appointed a high constable and 40
deputy constables.1

John Quincy Adams received many threatening letters and on one
occasion was threatened in person in the White House by a
court-martialed Army sergeant. In spite of this incident, the
President asked for no protection and continued to indulge his
fondness for solitary walks and early morning swims in the Potomac.2

Among pre-Civil War Presidents, Andrew Jackson aroused
particularly strong feelings. He received many threatening letters
which, with a fine contempt, he would endorse and send to the
Washington Globe for publication. On one occasion in May 1833, Jackson
was assaulted by a former Navy lieutenant, Robert B. Randolph, but
refused to prosecute him. This is not regarded as an attempt at
assassination, since Randolph apparently did not intend serious
injury. 3

Less than 2 years later, on the morning of January 10, 1835, as
Jackson emerged from the east portico of the Capitol, he was costed by
a would-be assassin, Richard Lawrence, an English-born house painter.
Lawrence fired his two pistols at the President, but they both
misfired. Lawrence was quickly overpowered and held for trial. A jury
found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was confined in jails
and mental hospitals for the rest of his life.4

The attack on Jackson did not inspire any action to provide
protection for the Chief Executive. Jackson's immediate successor,
Martin Van Buren, often walked to church alone and rode horseback
alone in the woods not far from the White House. In August 1842, after
an intoxicated painter had thrown rocks at President John Tyler, who
was walking on the grounds to the south of the White House, Congress
passed an act to establish an auxiliary watch for the protection of
public and private property in Washington. The force was to consist of
a captain and 15 men. This act was apparently aimed more at the
protection of the White House, which had been defaced on occasion,
than of the President. 5

Even before he took the oath of office, Abraham Lincoln was
thought to be the object of plots and conspiracies to kidnap or kill
him. Extremist opponents apparently contemplated desperate measures to
prevent his inauguration, and there is some evidence that they plotted
to attack him while he was passing through Baltimore on his way to
Washington.6

For the inauguration, the Army took precautions unprecedented up
to that time and perhaps more elaborate than any precautions taken
since. Soldiers occupied strategic points throughout the city, along
the procession route, and at the Capitol, while armed men in plain
clothes mingled with the crowds. Lincoln himself, in a carriage with
President Buchanan, was surrounded on all sides by such

Page 506

dense masses of soldiers that he was almost completely hidden from the
view of the crowds. The precautions at the Capitol during the ceremony
were almost as thorough and equally successful.7

Lincoln lived in peril during all his years in office. The volume
of threatening letters remained high throughout the war, but little
attention was paid to them. The few letters that were investigated
yielded no results.8 He was reluctant to surround himself with guards
and often rejected protection or sought to slip away from it. This has
been characteristic of almost all American Presidents. They have
regarded protection as a necessary affliction at best and contrary to
their normal instincts for either personal privacy or freedom to meet
the people. In Lincoln these instincts were especially strong, and he
suffered with impatience the efforts of his friends, the police, and
the military to safeguard him. 9

The protection of the President during the war varied greatly,
depending on Lincoln's susceptibility to warnings. Frequently,
military units were assigned to guard the White House and to accompany
the President on his travels. Lincoln's friend, Ward H. Lamon, on
becoming marshal of the District of Columbia in 1861, took personal
charge of protecting the President and provided guards for the
purpose, but he became so exasperated at the President's lack of
cooperation that he tendered his resignation. Lincoln did not accept
it. Finally, late in the war, in November 1864, four Washington
policemen were detailed to the White House to act as personal
bodyguards to the President. Lincoln tolerated them reluctantly and
insisted they remain as inconspicuous as possible. 10

In the closing days of the war, rumors of attempts on Lincoln's
life persisted. The well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth, a fanatical
Confederate sympathizer, plotted with others for months to kidnap the
President. The fall of the Confederacy apparently hardened his
determination to kill Lincoln.11 Booth's opportunity came on Good
Friday, April 14, 1865, when he learned that the President would be
attending a play at Ford's Theater that night. The President's
bodyguard for the evening was Patrolman John F. Parker of the
Washington Police, a man who proved himself unfit for protective duty.
He was supposed to remain on guard in the corridor outside of the
Presidential box during the entire performance of the play, but he
soon wandered off to watch the play and then even went outside the
theater to have a drink at a nearby saloon. Parker's dereliction of
duty left the President totally unprotected. 12 Shortly after 10
o'clock on that evening, Booth found his way up to the Presidential
box and shot the President in the head. The President's wound was a
mortal one; he died the next morning, April 15. 13

A detachment of troops captured Booth on April 26 at a farm near
Bowling Green, Va.; he received a bullet wound and died a few hours
later. At a trial in June, a military tribunal sentenced four of
Booth's associates to death and four others to terms of
imprisonment.14

Lincoln's assassination revealed the total inadequacy of
Presidential protection. A congressional committee conducted an
extensive in-

Page 507

vestigation of the assassination, but with traditional reluctance,
called for no action to provide better protection for the President in
the future. Nor did requests for protective measures come from the
President or from Government departments. This lack of concern for the
protection of the President may have derived also from the tendency of
the time to regard Lincoln's assassination as part of a unique crisis
that was not likely to happen to a future Chief Executive. 15

For a short time after the war, soldiers assigned by the War
Department continued to protect the White House and its grounds.
Metropolitan Washington policemen assisted on special occasions to
maintain order and prevent the congregation of crowds. The permanent
Metropolitan Police guard was reduced to three and assigned entirely
to protection at the White House. There was no special group of
trained officers to protect the person of the President. Presidents
after Lincoln continued to move about in Washington virtually
unattended, as their predecessors had done before the Civil War, and,
as before, such protection as they got at the White House came from
the doormen, who were not especially trained for guard duty.16

This lack of personal protection for the President came again
tragically to the attention of the country with the shooting of
President James A. Garfield in 1881. The President's assassin, Charles
J. Guiteau, was a self-styled "lawyer, theologian, and politician" who
had convinced himself that his unsolicited efforts to help elect
Garfield in 1880 entitled him to appointment as a consul in Europe.
Bitterly disappointed that the President ignored his repeated written
requests for appointment to office and obsessed with a kind of
megalomania, he resolved to kill Garfield.

At that time Guiteau was 38 years old and had an unusually
checkered career behind him. He had been an itinerant and generally
unsuccessful lecturer and evangelist, a lawyer, and a would-be
politician. While it is true he resented Garfield's failure to appoint
him consul in Paris as a reward for his wholly illusory contribution
to the Garfield campaign, and he verbally attacked Garfield for his
lack of support for the so-called Stalwart wing of the Republican
Party, these may not have supplied the total motivation for his crime.
At his trial he testified that the "Deity" had commanded him to remove
the President. There is no evidence that he confided his assassination
plans to anyone or that he had any close friends or confidants. He
made his attack on the President under circumstances where escape
after the shooting was inconceivable. There were some hereditary
mental problems in his family and Guiteau apparently believed in
divine inspiration. 17

Guiteau later testified that he had three opportunities to
attack the President prior to the actual shooting. On all of these
occasions,

Page 508

within a brief period of 3 weeks, the President was unguarded. Guiteau
finally realized his intent on the morning of July 2, 1881. As
Garfield was walking to a train in the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad
Station in Washington, Guiteau stepped up and shot him in the back.
Garfield did not die from the effects of the wound until September 19,
1881. Although there was evidence of serious abnormality in Guiteau,
he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged. The
execution took place on June 30, 1882.18

At least one newspaper, the New York Tribune, predicted that the
assault on Garfield would lead to the President becoming "the slave of
his office, the prisoner of forms and restrictions," in sharp and
unwelcome contrast to the splendidly simple life he had been able to
live before.

The bullet of the assassin who lurked in the Washington railway
station to take the life of President Garfield shattered the simple
Republican manner of life which the custom of nearly a century has
prescribed for the Chief Magistrate of the United States. Our
Presidents have been the first citizens of the Republic-nothing more.
With a measure of power in their hands far greater than is wielded by
the ruler of any limited monarchy in Europe, they have never
surrounded themselves with the forms and safeguards of courts. The
White House has been a business office to everybody. Its occupant has
always been more accessible than the heads of great commercial
establishments. When the passions of the war were at fever heat, Mr.
Lincoln used to have a small guard of cavalry when he rode out to his
summer residence at the Soldier's Home; but at no other time in our
history has it been thought needful for a President to have any
special protection against violence when inside or outside the White
House. Presidents have driven about Washington like other people and
travelled over the country as unguarded and unconstrained as any
private citizen. 19

The prediction of the Tribune did not come to pass. Although the
Nation was shocked by this deed, its representatives took no steps to
provide the President with personal protection. The President
continued to move about Washington, sometimes completely alone, and to
travel without special protection. There is a story that President
Chester A. Arthur, Garfield's successor, once went to a ceremony at
the Washington Navy Yard on a public conveyance that he hailed in
front of the White House. 20

During Grover Cleveland's second administration (1893-97) the
number of threatening letters addressed to the President increased
markedly, and Mrs. Cleveland persuaded the President to increase the
number of White House policemen to 27 from the 3 who had constituted
the force since the Civil War. In 1894, the Secret Service began to
provide protection, on an informal basis. 21

Page 509

The Secret Service was organized as a division of the Department
of the Treasury in 1865, to deal with counterfeiting.22 Its
jurisdiction was extended to other fiscal crimes against the United
States in later appropriations acts,23 but its early work in assisting
in protecting the President was an unofficial, stopgap response to a
need for a trained organization, with investigative capabilities, to
perform this task. In 1894, while investigating a plot by a group of
gamblers in Colorado to assassinate President Cleveland, the Secret
Service assigned a small detail of operatives to the White House to
help protect him. Secret Service men accompanied the President and his
family to their vacation home in Massachusetts; special details
protected the President in Washington, on trips, and at special
functions.24 For a time, two agents rode in a buggy behind President
Cleveland's carriage, but this practice attracted so much attention in
the opposition newspapers that it was soon discontinued at the
President's insistence.25 These initially informal and part-time
arrangements eventually led to the organization of permanent
systematic protection for the President and his family.

During the Spanish-American War the Secret Service stationed a
detail at the White House to provide continuous protection for
President McKinley. The special wartime protective measures were
relaxed after the war, but Secret Service guards remained on duty at
the White House at least part of the time. 26

Between 1894 and 1900, anarchists murdered the President of
France, the Premier of Spain, the Empress of Austria, and the King of
Italy. At the turn of the century the Secret Service thought that the
strong police action taken against the anarchists in Europe was
compelling them to flee and that many were coming to the United
States. Concerned about the protection of the President, the Secret
Service increased the number of guards and directed that a guard
accompany him on all of his trips. 27

Unlike Lincoln and Garfield, President McKinley was being guarded
when he was shot by Leon F. Czolgosz, an American-born 28-year-old
factory worker and farmhand. On September 6, 1901, the President was
holding a brief reception for the public in the Temple of Music at the
Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. Long lines of people passed
between two rows of policemen and soldiers to reach the President and
shake his hand. In the immediate vicinity of the President were four
Buffalo detectives, four soldiers, and three Secret Service agents.
Two of the Secret Service men were facing the President at a distance
of 3 feet. One of them stated later that it was normally his custom to
stand at the side of the President on such occasions, but that he had
been requested not to do so at this time in order to permit McKinley's
secretary and the president of the exposition to stand on either side
of McKinley. Czolgosz joined the line concealed a pistol under a
handkerchief, and when he stood in front of the President shot twice
through the handkerchief. McKinley fell critically wounded.28

Page 510

Czolgosz, a self-styled anarchist, did not believe in rulers of
any kind. There is evidence that the organized anarchists in the
U.S.A. did not accept or trust him. He was not admitted as a member to
any of the secret anarchist societies. No co-plotters were ever
discovered, and there is no evidence that he had confided in anyone. A
calm inquiry made by two eminent alienists about a year after Czolgosz
was executed found that Czolgosz had for some time been suffering from
delusions. One was that he was an anarchist; another was that it was
his duty to assassinate the President. 29

The assassin said he had no grudge against the President
personally but did not believe in the republican form of government or
in rulers of any kind. In his written confession he included the
words, "I don't believe one man should have so much service and
another man should have none." As he was strapped to the chair to be
electrocuted, he said: "I killed the President because he was the
enemy of the good people--the good working people. I am not sorry for
my crime."30

McKinley lingered on for 8 days before he died of blood poisoning
early on the morning of September 14. Czolgosz, who had been captured
immediately, was swiftly tried, convicted, and condemned to death.
Although it seemed to some contemporaries that Czolgosz was
incompetent, the defense made no effort to plead insanity. Czolgosz
was executed 45 days after the President's death. Investigations by
the Buffalo police and the Secret Service revealed no accomplices and
no plot of any kind.31

This third assassination of a President in a little more than a
generation--it was only 36 years since Lincoln had been killed--shook
the nation and aroused it to a greater awareness of the uniqueness of
the Presidency and the grim hazards that surrounded an incumbent of
that Office. The first congressional session after the assassination
of McKinley gave more attention to legislation concerning attacks on
the President than had any previous Congress but did not pass any
measures for the protection of the President.32 Nevertheless, in 1902
the Secret Service, which was then the only Federal general
investigative agency of any consequence, assumed full-time
responsibility for the safety of the President. Protection of the
President now became one of its major permanent functions, and it
assigned two men to its original full-time White House detail.
Additional agents were provided when the President traveled or went on
vacation.33

Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first President to experience the
extensive system of protection that has surrounded the President ever
since, voiced an opinion of Presidential protection that was probably
shared in part by most of his successors. In a letter to Senator Henry
Cabot Lodge in 1906, from his summer home, he wrote:

Page 511

The Secret Service men are a very small but very necessary thorn
in the flesh. Of course, they would not be the least use preventing
any assault upon my life. I do not believe there is any danger of such
an assault, and if there were, as Lincoln said, "though it would be
safer for a President to live in a cage, it would interfere with his
business." But it is only the Secret Service men who render life
endurable, as you would realize if you saw the procession of carriages
that pass through the place, the procession of people on foot who try
to get into the place, not to speak of the multitude of cranks and
others who are stopped in the village.34

Roosevelt, who had succeeded to the Presidency because of an
assassin's bullet, himself became the object of an assassination
attempt a few years after he left office and when he was no longer
under Secret Service protection. During the Presidential campaign of
1912, just as he was about to make a political speech in Milwaukee on
October 14, he was shot and wounded in the breast by John N. Schrank,
a 36-year-old German-born ex-tavern keeper. A folded manuscript of his
long speech and the metal case for his eyeglasses in the breast pocket
of Roosevelt's coat were all that prevented the assassination.35

Schrank had a vision in 1901, induced possibly by McKinley's
assassination, which took on meaning for him after Roosevelt, 11 years
later, started to campaign for the Presidency. In this vision the
ghost of McKinley appeared to him and told him not to let a murderer
(i.e., Roosevelt, who according to the vision had murdered McKinley)
become President. It was then that he determined upon the
assassination. At the bidding of McKinley's ghost, he felt he had no
choice but to kill Theodore Roosevelt. After his attempt on Roosevelt,
Schrank was found to be insane and was committed to mental hospitals
in Wisconsin for the rest of his life.36

The establishment and extension of the Secret Service authority
for protection was a prolonged process. Although the Secret Service
undertook to provide full-time protection for the President beginning
in 1902, it received neither funds for the purpose nor sanction from
the Congress until 1906 when the Sundry Civil Expenses Act for 1907
included funds for protection of the President by the Secret
Service.37 Following the election of William Howard Taft in 1908, the
Secret Service began providing protection for the President-elect.
This practice received statutory authorization in 1913, and in the
same year, Congress authorized permanent protection of the
President.38 It remained necessary to renew the authority annually in
the Appropriations Acts until 1951.

As in the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, the coming of war in
1917 caused increased concern for the safety of the President.
Congress enacted a law, since referred to as the threat statute,
making it a crime to threaten the President by mail or in any other
manner.39 In 1917 Congress also authorized protection for the
President's immediate family by the Secret Service.40

Page 512

As the scope of the Presidency expanded during the 20th century,
the Secret Service found the problems of protection becoming more
numerous. In 1906, for the first time in history, a President traveled
outside the United States while in office. When Theodore Roosevelt
visited Panama in that year, he was accompanied and protected by
Secret Service men.41 In 1918-19 Woodrow Wilson broadened the
precedent of Presidential foreign travel when he traveled to Europe
with a Secret Service escort of 10 men to attend the Versailles Peace
Conference.42

The attempt on the life of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt
in 1933 further demonstrated the broad scope and complexity of the
protection problems facing the Secret Service. Giuseppe Zangara was a
bricklayer and stonemason with a professed hatred of capitalists and
Presidents. He seemed to be obsessed with the desire to kill a
President. After his arrest he confessed that he had first planned to
go to Washington to kill President Herbert Hoover, but as the cold
climate of the North was bad for his stomach trouble, he was loath to
leave Miami, where he was staying. When he read in the paper that
President-elect Roosevelt would be in Miami, he resolved to kill
him.43

On the night of February 15, 1933, at, a political rally in
Miami's Bayfront Park, the President-elect sat on the top of the rear
seat of his automobile with a small microphone in his hand as he made
a short informal talk. Fortunately for him, however, he slid down into
the seat just before Zangara could get near enough to take aim. The
assassin's arm may have been jogged just as he shot; the five rounds
he directed at Roosevelt went awry. However, he mortally wounded Mayor
Anton Cermak, of Chicago, and hit four other persons; the
President-elect, by a miracle, escaped. Zangara, of course, never had
any chance of escaping.44

Zangara was electrocuted on March 20, 1933, only 33 days after his
attempt on Roosevelt. No evidence of accomplices or conspiracy came to
light, but there was some sensational newspaper speculation, wholly
undocumented, that Zangara may have been hired by Chicago gangsters to
kill Cermak.45

The force provided since the Civil War by the Washington
Metropolitan Police for the protection of the White House had grown to
54 men by 1922.46 In that year Congress enacted legislation creating
the White House Police Force as a separate organization under the
direct control of the President.47 This force was actually supervised
by the President's military aide until 1930, when Congress placed
supervision under the Chief of the Secret Service.48 Although Congress
transferred control and supervision of the force to the Secretary of
the Treasury in 1962,49 the Secretary delegated supervision to the
Chief of the Secret Service.50

The White House detail of the Secret Service grew in size slowly
from the original 2 men assigned in 1902. In 1914 it still numbered
only 5, but during World War I it was increased to 10 men. Additional
men were added when the President traveled. After the

Page 513

war the size of the detail grew until it reached 16 agents and 2
supervisors by 1939. World War II created new and greater protection
problems, especially those arising from the President's trips abroad
to the Grand Strategy Conferences in such places as Casablanca,
Quebec, Tehran, Cairo, and Yalta. To meet the increased demands, the
White House detail was increased to 37 men early in the war.51

The volume of mail received by the White House had always been
large, but it reached huge proportions under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Presidents had always received threatening letters but never in such
quantities. To deal with this growing problem, the Secret Service
established in 1940 the Protective Research Section to analyze and
make available to those charged with protecting the President,
information from White House mail and other sources concerning people
potentially capable of violence to the President. The Protective
Research Section undoubtedly permitted the Secret Service to
anticipate and forestall many incidents that might have been
embarrassing or harmful to the President.52

Although there was no advance warning of the attempt on Harry S.
Truman's life on November 1, 1950, the protective measures taken by
the Secret Service availed, and the assassins never succeeded in
firing directly at the President. The assassins--Oscar Collazo and
Griselio Torresola, Puerto Rican Nationalists living in New York--
tried to force their way into Blair House, at the time the President's
residence while the White House was being repaired. Blair House was
guarded by White House policemen and Secret Service agents. In the
ensuing gun battle, Torresola and one White House policeman were
killed, and Collazo and two White House policemen were wounded. Had
the assassins succeeded in entering the front door of Blair House,
they would probably have been cut down immediately by another Secret
Service agent inside who kept the doorway covered with a submachine
gun from his vantage point at the foot of the main stairs. In all,
some 27 shots were fired in less than 3 minutes.53

Collazo was brought to trial in 1951 and sentenced to death, but
President Truman commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on July
24, 1952. Although there was a great deal of evidence linking Collazo
and Torresola to the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico and its leader,
Pedro Albizu Campos, the Government could not establish that the
attack on the President was part of a larger Nationalist conspiracy.54

The attack on President Truman led to the enactment in 1951 of
legislation that permanently authorized the Secret Service to protect
the President, his immediate family, the President-elect, and the
Vice President, the last upon his request. Protection of the Vice
President by the Secret Service had begun in January 1945 when Harry
S. Truman occupied the office.55

In 1962 Congress further enlarged the list of Government officers
to be safeguarded, authorizing protection of the Vice President (or
the officer next in order of succession to the Presidency) without
requiring his request therefore; of the Vice President-elect; and of a

Page 514

former President, at his request, for a reasonable period after his
departure from office. The Secret Service considered this "reasonable
period" to be 6 months.56

Amendments to the threat statute of 1917, passed in 1955 and 1962,
made it a crime to threaten to harm the President-elect, the Vice
Presidents or other officers next in succession to either office. The
President's immediate family was not included in the threat statute.57

Congressional concern regarding the uses to which the President
might put the Secret Service--first under Theodore Roosevelt and
subsequently under Woodrow Wilson--caused Congress to place tight
restrictions on the functions of the Service and the uses of its
funds. 58 The restrictions probably prevented the Secret Service from
developing into a general investigative agency, leaving the field open
for some other agency when the need arose. The other agency proved to
be the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) established within the
Department of Justice in 1908. 57

The FBI grew rapidly in the 1920's, and especially in the 1930's
and after, establishing itself as the largest, best equipped, and best
known of all U.S. Government investigative agencies. In the
appropriations of the FBI there recurred annually an item for the
"protection of the person of the President of the United States," that
had first appeared in the appropriation of the Department of Justice
in 1910 under the heading "Miscellaneous Objects." 60 But there is no
evidence that the Justice Department ever exercised any direct
responsibility for the protection of the President. Although it had no
prescribed protection functions, according to its Director, J. Edgar
Hoover, the FBI did provide protection to Vice President Charles
Curtis at his request, when he was serving under Herbert Hoover from
1929 to 1933. Over the years the FBI contribution to Presidential
protection was confined chiefly to the referral to the Secret Service
of the names of people who might be potentially dangerous to the
President.61

In recent years the Secret Service has remained a small and
specialized bureau, restricted to very limited functions prescribed by
Congress. In 1949, a task force of the Commission on Organization of
the Executive Branch of the Government (Hoover Commission),
recommended nonfiscal functions be removed from the Treasury
Department. 62 The recommendation called for transfer of the White
House detail, White House Police Force, and Treasury Guard Force from
the Secret Service to the Department of Justice. The final report of
the Commission on the Treasury Department omitted this recommendation,
leaving the protective function with the Secret Service.63 At a
meeting of the Commission, ex-President Hoover, in a reference to the
proposed transfer, expressed the opinion that "the President will
object to having a 'private eye' looking after these fellows and would
rather continue with the service." 64

In 1963 the Secret Service was one of several investigative
agencies in the Treasury Department. Its major functions were to
combat counterfeiting and to protect the President, his family, and
other

Page 515

designated persons. 65 The Chief of the Secret Service administered
its activities through four divisions: Investigation, Inspection,
Administrative, and Security, and 65 field offices throughout the
country, each under a special agent in charge who reported directly to
Washington. The Security Division supervised the White House detail,
the White House Police, and the Treasury Guard Force. During fiscal
year 1963 (July 1, 1962-June 30, 1963) the Secret Service had an
average strength of 513, of whom 351 were special agents. Average
strength of the White House Police during the year was 179.66

Bibliographic note: Web version based on Report of the President's Commission on the
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Washington, DC: United States Government Printing
Office, 1964. 1 volume, 888 pages. The formatting of this Web version may differ from the
original.